Antique 1930s Redman Brand Wenatchee District Apples Crate Label 🍎 — H. S. Denison & Co., Wenatchee WA

Who Packed Redman Apples? 🍎 Antique 1930s Redman Brand Wenatchee District Crate Label, H. S. Denison & Co.

Size: 10" x 8 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

🍎 The Label

This is the REDMAN BRAND apple label, printed for the Wenatchee District — Wenatchee, Washington's own corner of the apple trade. Across the top it reads REDMAN BRAND, and beside the portrait, WENATCHEE DISTRICT APPLES. Along the bottom: DISTRIBUTED BY H. S. DENISON & CO., WENATCHEE, WASHINGTON, and PRODUCE OF U.S.A. CONTENTS ONE U.S. BUSHEL BY VOLUME sits in the corner, the standard measure for a crate of the day. I've got it in both the blue ground and the red.

The picture is a portrait of a Native American man, a single feather with a red tuft in his hair and a bead necklace at his throat, a red-and-yellow apple with its leaves beside him, and behind him a flat, pictograph-style scene — standing figures, a row of tipis, mounted riders — drawn in the manner of a painted hide. The red version carries a tiny "US" monogram down in its lower corner.

🍏 H. S. Denison & Co.

Denison got its start in 1916 down in Freewater, Oregon, as a fruit-shipping and export house, which is exactly why PRODUCE OF U.S.A. is printed here — they sold apples overseas, with a London agent handling their export trade by the 1960s. In the summer of 1924 they opened a branch office in Wenatchee, with Fred D. McConnell put in charge of it. The story goes that it was a hard freeze wiping out most of the Milton-Freewater crop that sent Denison north to Wenatchee, and the trade papers do record a December freeze that hit that district in the winter of 1923-24. Paul Scea came up through that office — secretary-treasurer by 1930, later its manager and a partner in the firm — while Les Lewis joined Denison in 1929 and stayed on through 1965, keeping an interest in the company's Chelan Apple Co. besides. Redman was on Denison's brand list out of the Wenatchee office by 1936, alongside Denison's Crest and Cream of Chelan, and it was still on the list as late as 1958. They called themselves shippers, distributors, brokers and exporters, and "distributed by" is exactly what the label says.

Denison shows up in the federal record too, and not for its labels. Its name rode out on Skookum's Mountain Goat apples and its own Dainty Maid brand as well as Redman, shipped from Cashmere as well as Wenatchee, and three of its loads were written up in the government's Notices of Judgment for spray residue, lead arsenate being the orchard spray of that era. In 1933 inspectors stopped 152 boxes at Mobile, Alabama and 163 boxes of Mountain Goat apples at Colorado Springs; no one claimed either load and the marshal destroyed both. A 798-box Dainty Maid shipment sent into Georgia late in 1941 ended the same way.

🏔️ Wenatchee District

Wenatchee, named for the Wenatchi people, was platted in 1888; its old Commercial Club slogan, "Home of the World's Best Apples," is where the Apple Capital of the World title comes from, and the label wears that district pride right in the script beside the fruit word. This one's had a life outside my shop, too — it's reproduced in Naila Clerici's 1993 study of Native American imagery on old advertising, "Victorian Brand, Indian Brand," and again in Joe Davidson's "Fruit Crate Art." Washington State University's own manuscripts collection holds Denison labels as well, so this sheet is in good company.

I have it in both blue and red grounds.